If you watch TV (with all the product placements), or use twitter a lot, you could be forgiven for believing we are all about to become Mac users.  Further to this, today I read an article by Mark Nutter at Smashing Magazine, Five reasons why designers / developers are switching to Mac.

I found this interesting. Let’s be clear I am a PC, so much so that I turned up in this photo on FaceBook, which Jane Copeland cleverly tagged, “who wants to play One of These Things Is Not like the Other with the laptops?” Yes there is my red Dell in the middle of a sea of Macs. [Read more...]

I often use an analogy of prospecting for gold when asked why I go to certain events or participate in some seminars. In the rough early days of prospecting, people stood in streams, panning for little nuggets of gold, to pay their way. Much of this was mundane, fruitless work, but work none the less.

Throughout the process there was a chance of finding those gold nuggets, or if that stream ended up being empty of gold, they would move to another. Attending conferences can be a little like this if they are industry specific. Often you will discover you already have heard, or know some or a fair bit of the content, because the conferences are aiming to fill a middle road or a broad area of attendees. Let’s face it they need to make money so if they are too niche they may not get enough people engaged to make profits.

The trick in all of these events, in my opinion, is to pan the stream for the little nuggets. Often the combination of a few little nuggets adds up to something far more valuable than finding one big nugget.

There are many good reasons to attend events, and I greatly enjoyed my time at SMX Sydney 2009 for the very obvious reasons of meeting new people, re-meeting people I have met before and for the social engagement.

Here are 13 little (or not so) nuggets that were worth panning the stream for: [Read more...]